“And do you think he will like being transformed into a lamb, while you remain a lion?”
“I don’t suppose so, but we’ll give him his chance to try to become a lion too.”
Jeanne shook her head. “No, monsieur, wolf he is and wolf he will remain. A wolf with venomous teeth. The civilized world must see that the teeth are always drawn.”
“I’m speaking of fifty years hence,” said the sergeant.
“And I of three hundred years hence.”
“You’re mistaken, mademoiselle.”
Jeanne shook her head. “No. I’m not mistaken. Tell me. Why do you want to become brother to the Boche?”
“I’m not going to be his brother till the war’s over,” said the sergeant stolidly. “At present I am devoting all my faculties to killing as many of him as I can.”
She smiled. “Sufficient for the day is the good thereof. Go on killing them, monsieur. The more you kill the fewer there will be for your children and your grandchildren to lie down with.”
She left him and tried to puzzle out his philosophy. For the ordinary French philosophy of the war is very simple. They have no high-falutin, altruistic ideas of improving the Boche. They don’t care a tinker’s curse what happens to the unholy brood beyond the Rhine, so long as they are beaten, humiliated, subjected: so long as there is no chance of their ever deflowering again with their brutality the sacred soil of France. The French mind cannot conceive the idea of this beautiful brotherhood; but, on the contrary, rejects it as something loathsome, something bordering on spiritual defilement….